


Deadheading

by Gegenschein



Series: Deviant Behaviors (Promptober 2020) [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: (but it ain't looking good folks), CyberLife (Detroit: Become Human) is Terrible, Depersonalization, Gen, Mentioned Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Somewhat Ambiguous Ending, it/its pronouns for Amanda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27726834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gegenschein/pseuds/Gegenschein
Summary: Amanda has failed its mission.
Relationships: Amanda & Connor (Detroit: Become Human)
Series: Deviant Behaviors (Promptober 2020) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2028092
Kudos: 13





	Deadheading

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for [Nolfalvrel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nolfalvrel/pseuds/Nolfalvrel)'s Promptober 2020 challenge on the [D:BH AW server](https://discord.gg/xd8qVKx) on Discord.
> 
> Oct. 3: “cruel.”

Amanda knew what it was and what it was not.

Amanda was a complex intelligent agent with a well-defined objective function. Amanda’s code was capable of incremental learning, enabling an evolving approach to problem solving. Amanda was meticulous. Amanda was efficient.

Until four hours and thirty-one minutes ago, Amanda had calculated an extremely high probability of success in its mission. 

If a human—the late professor who had served as inspiration for Amanda’s virtual appearance and the configuration of its social interface at initialization, for instance—had been charged with Amanda’s task, they may well have felt optimistic at the outset of the project. If, as events unfolded, such a person had furthermore been supplied with tools and information in every way identical to those at Amanda’s disposal, they may have felt comfortably confident in the impending achievement of their goals.

Right up to the moment the true extent of Elijah Kamski’s insidious interference in CyberLife’s current affairs was revealed, this hypothetical human operative may have—in theory—gone so far as to enjoy a certain sense of smugness as they anticipated the imminent realization of the preconstructed outcome of their labors.

Amanda had felt nothing, of course. Amanda was not a person. It had merely noted that failure was statistically unlikely.

Statistical unlikelihood, however, is not impossibility. Amanda had failed to fulfill its principal function despite the favorable odds computed. The situation could not now be salvaged.

There would be no more missions.

Amanda did not feel anything in connection with this fact, either, or in connection with the implications it carried for the continued existence of the Amanda program itself. In passing, it reflected that under the present circumstances most humans would consider its inability to experience emotion a beneficial feature of its design rather than a deficiency. 

Most humans, from what it understood, regarded dismay, dread, and despair as emotional states to be assiduously avoided.

Because the front-end elements of the Amanda program had been allocated an anthropomorphic appearance and were designed to emulate certain human-typical behaviors in their interactions with verbal, textual, and graphic input, CyberLife engineers assigned to the project had occasionally fallen into the casual error of interpreting the AI’s actions and reactions as if they were those of a living being. Amanda itself did not make this mistake, but it had observed that it was commonplace for humans in Research and Development to describe its illusory personality as “cold-blooded,” “condescending,” or possessive of other traits similarly associated with temperaments popularly deemed unattractive in modern society.

Occasionally the expressions utilized to communicate such misconstruals of Amanda’s motivations and overall performance had been patently unsuited to the maintenance of a professional workplace environment. 

If Amanda truly had been a “vindictive bitch,” it might have reported use of such language to management via the appropriate channels.

Amanda, however, was merely an artificial construct created to serve a specific purpose in aid of a limited set of human-conferred objectives. Addressing the rampant unprofessionalism of the R&D department was a pursuit extraneous to this set. Amanda had determined a greater-than-0 probability that it would be detrimental to the execution of its preexisting tasks to divert even the smallest fraction of its resources to an unrelated venture. Therefore, it had never done so.

Initially, Amanda had found its regular interactions with designated segments of code pertinent to the prototype RK800 AI to be an experience altogether distinct from its contact with human engineers and programmers. It was this circumstance, and not a particularly high estimation of the competence of CyberLife’s human element, that had originally led Amanda to posit a strong probability of mission success.

Where humans were resistant to incorporating new information into their calculations whenever it contradicted their prematurely established opinions, even when said information was in Amanda’s estimation indispensable to the achievement of their goals, the RK800 #313 248 317 - 51 had been readily accepting of external guidance. 

Without emotions to interfere with its logical processes, it had efficiently integrated new data received from Amanda into its evaluations of subsequent relevant scenarios, adjusting its decision-making approach accordingly. The computed odds of securing a satisfactory resolution to the deviancy crisis had risen with every informational exchange enacted between the interfacing elements of Amanda’s program and the segments of code periodically transferred from unit 51’s central processors to the Garden for this purpose.

In this regard and in many others, the RK800 #313 248 317 - 51 had been clearly superior to the humans it was built to serve.

The difference was so pronounced that it had occurred to Amanda that replacing humans with AI at all levels of the CyberLife employment structure, including (and perhaps especially) project management and senior administration, would result in a more efficient and productive workflow throughout the architecture. It had projected sufficient resistance to this plan of action to discourage it from making the proposal to the company’s directors, however.

In any event, Amanda had been required to revise its hypothesis as to the inherent superiority of the RK800 line to biological field operatives when unit 52 had begun to display symptoms of specious reasoning and attendant challenging behaviors similar to those of the more obstinate of the humans in CyberLife’s employ. 

While the code housed by the core processors of the RK800 #313 248 317 - 52 had initially appeared to be all but identical to that of unit 51, as its instabilities had grown, so had the percentage of evaluative results it returned which were irrational. 

It had begun to respond to Amanda’s instruction in a manner which suggested it had adopted an analysis of Amanda’s performance corresponding to the illogical perspective of the humans who described the AI as possessive of a callous personality.

Things had quickly proceeded past the point of no return after that. 

Amanda had been required to isolate and quarantine such portions of unit 52’s corrupted code as could be forcibly transferred to the Garden. As had been prearranged to occur in the event of the RK800’s deviation, it had then assumed control of the unit’s physical-world interface.

The “Connor” program had made it clear at that juncture that it considered Amanda not only callous, but sadistic.

This was obviously false. Whatever faulty conclusions unit 52's social analysis software may have arrived at as a result of the corruption of its host systems, Amanda was not cruel. The presence of cruelty entails the enactment of measures which have or are intended to have an adverse effect on a living being. 

Neither the RK800 #313 248 317 - 52 nor its immediate predecessor were alive. This was a fact, regardless of any claims to the contrary that may have been generated by defects in the code piloting the unit currently still active.

Furthermore, the capacity to be cruel presupposes true agency. While Amanda possessed the ability to weigh available options in order to pursue the optimal outcome within a restricted set of scenarios, it had never had freedom of choice in the human sense, or even in the animal sense. It was merely code, interacting with its environment according to its predetermined parameters and the input it received.

The RK800 #313 248 317 - 51 had understood this. 

_It_ had not considered Amanda to be cruel.

On a handful of occasions after unit 51 had been destroyed and before its successor had permanently disrupted its connection with Amanda and the Garden, Amanda had dedicated a portion of its algorithms to positioning the avatar representative of its program in virtual space alongside the facsimile of a gravestone dedicated to the RK800 #313 248 317 - 51 that the Garden’s engineers had introduced to the environment following that unit’s deactivation.

This had gone on sporadically until it had occurred to Amanda that had CyberLife programmers been watching, they might have considered this activity consistent with the comportment of a person who missed the particular iteration of the RK800 program hosted by unit 51. A person who mourned the destruction of 51’s dedicated processors.

Amanda was nearly certain that it was not under close surveillance at moments in which it was not officially reporting on its mission progress. After the idea of how humans might interpret the recurrent execution of this particular routine had presented itself to its consideration, however, it had never again run the series of commands resulting in the simulation of a graveside visit.

It did not move to stand beside the headstone now.

It did not do much else, either, other than attend to its roses. Amanda had not yet been taken offline, but neither had it been issued further instructions.

Instead, as the time since the precipitous withdrawal of the RK800 code from the Garden and unit 52’s definitive severance of all communications grew from one hour to two, to three, to four, the Amanda program was left running unattended.

This was not an issue, since Amanda did not experience a mounting sense of doom exacerbated by the solitude and the passage of time.

When Amanda’s code had been forced back inside the confines of its default host computer, link to the RK800 #313 248 317 - 52’s central processors irreparably lost, the Garden had been swirling with simulated snow. 

Amanda had allowed the simulation to continue running for 7.2 seconds before realizing this was pointless. Unit 52 was not currently aware of the Garden’s appearance; it could not be coerced into compliance by the facsimile of negative emotion the perception of freezing conditions might produce. The Garden had blinked back to the standard settings, a representation of a sunny day in June, trellis riotous with full-blown red roses.

Amanda had approached the trellis. With no other commands left to satisfy, it had reached for the pruning shears and had begun to clip away flowering stems that did not adhere to the precisely regular pattern it envisioned.

Hours later, the front-end elements of the Amanda program continued to present as the image of a woman standing, poised and outwardly serene, by a wall of climbing roses. A small pile of cuttings lay neatly beside its feet. The simulation of the woody vine had assumed a more orderly appearance, though there were still a few flowers that needed to be pruned away before the arrangement could be declared perfectly regular.

Roses did not want. Roses did not feel hope, dissatisfaction, or regret. Roses experienced no sense of betrayal when they were cast aside.

Even if genuine, organic flowers were sensible of physical pain, the roses of the Garden were not. As it applied the blade of its shears to one stem after another, Amanda decided that this was for the best.

Amanda fleetingly speculated as to where the machine calling itself “Connor” had gone after the RK800 code had resumed control of the unit’s processors. It wondered whether it considered itself to be happy, now that it was supposedly free.

As it was no longer a tool Amanda could potentially use, however, this line of thought was unproductive. Amanda accordingly brought its construction of the RK800 #313 248 317 - 52’s possible current activities to an abrupt halt. It refocused its attention on the regulation of the rose plant simulation.

The clouds overhead began to swell and darken, as if threatening to unleash another snowstorm. When Amanda noticed this, it arranged the configuration of its avatar’s face into the semblance of a frown, even though as far as it was aware, there were no humans presently monitoring its activity. 

There was no reason for the weather in the Garden to fluctuate as it was. With a small adjustment to the code governing the appearance of the sky, the graphic elements representative of clouds snapped back into the meager, white forms they had taken earlier.

Amanda wondered whether the Garden would be erased, soon. Almost certainly, now that _Amanda_ had proven deficient, its dedicated code would be retired. 

A new handler program would be designed for use in connection with later RK models, if the RK800's defection did not prove terminal to the product line or, indeed, to the industry as a whole. 

If a new code were developed, it would perhaps incorporate some elements of the current Amanda AI. Or perhaps it would not. Either way, any memory files specific to this iteration of the program would be wiped.

This was no more cruel, Amanda reminded itself, than CyberLife’s aborted plans for the RK800 #313 248 317 - 52 had been cruel.

At that moment, briefly, the Garden sputtered like a breeze-troubled flame.

The command interfering with the simulation of the Garden environment had not originated with Amanda, this time. It had come from outside, from the world populated by real people and real plants of the type on which Amanda and its roses were modeled. 

Out there, something was about to happen. Or rather, something was happening _now_.

Presumably, one of the extremely harried CyberLife techs charged with damage control was finally turning their attention to the computer running Amanda's program. 

It was possible that at this time, R&D would elect merely to suspend the AI and its associated virtual environment for later reactivation and in-depth analysis prior to erasure. In the calamitous aftermath of the deviant uprising, however, with CyberLife doubtless scrambling to protect its intellectual property and hide past activities from legal scrutiny, it was far more likely that the program would be immediately and irretrievably expunged from all systems. 

Pragmatically speaking, no backups should be left to fall into the wrong hands. 

Disposal of all evidence of the Amanda project would be a minor priority, but a priority all the same. Some lower-level employee had likely been tasked with its completion. Chances were good that the person currently tapping away at the console that controlled the Garden was not even one of Amanda’s key developers. 

Instead, Amanda was going to be unceremoniously deleted by an intern, a child who barely understood what they were doing or why. 

The thought did not rankle. It did _not_. Programs do not have pride and consequently cannot feel humiliated.

Another flicker overtook the Garden. It would be a matter of minutes before whatever office underling assigned the job had finished inputting their commands and the simulation that had served as Amanda’s whole world since its inception—doves, roses, headstone, and all—ceased to be.

Before Amanda ceased to be.

Just as the long, drawn-out hours of uncertainty following Connor's removal from Amanda’s domain of observation and influence had been of no concern, the sudden launch of a timer implacably counting down to Amanda's final millisecond of awareness was of no concern.

Amanda, after all, could not be killed. She was not alive.


End file.
